Published on Monday, October 22, 2001 in the Independent/UK
<http://www.independent.co.uk/>  
 

Obsession with bin Laden Crosses All Frontiers

by Robert Fisk
         
After Osama, "Godfather of Terror'' – our very own clichι – comes Osama,
"Savior of the Muslim World'', Osama, the "New Saladin'', Osama "V
Mahdi''. Amid the blue moped fumes of the Peshawar bazaar, his face
beams out of a hundred bookshops, turbaned, wise, half-smiling,
disembodied. 


On the front cover of Khaled Choudhury's Osama bin Laden: Freedom
Fighter or Terrorist? – readers may guess which conclusion the author
draws – Mr bin Laden gazes down at us from the sky above the snows of
the Afghan mountains. Printed by Shaheed Publishers (shaheed means
martyr) Choudhury's slim, hard-cover volume is dedicated "to all Islamic
Fighters''.

But let's be fair. Only a month ago, the photo-editors of Time magazine
asked to buy for a possible front cover one of my snapshots of Mr bin
Laden – which I took in one of his desert camps in Afghanistan in 1996 –
and then announced that they intended to "age" the photo digitally to
make the world's bete noir look older. I told Time to go jump in the
lake. No photo. But few lakes are deep enough for the white T-shirt
currently hanging in the bazaars here. "Jihad is our mission," says one,
beneath Mr bin Laden's face, followed by the quotation, "As a Muslim, it
is my aim to spread Islam throughout the world by love or power".
Another exhorts the wearer to remember that Osama "is a Muslim brother –
Osama is one of us".

Western journalists will no doubt be sending this little keepsake to
their editors; in the days of the Iranian revolution, most of us bought
watches illustrated with Ayatollah Khomeini's face in which the minute
hand was composed of a splodge of martyr's blood. But we should not mock
the purpose, or possible result, of this hero worship in the souks of
Pakistan. Reading Choudhury's work, you can see why men and women here
regard Mr bin Laden as a just and good man, persecuted by the United
States not because he blows up buildings but because he defies the
greatest power on Earth. The Americans may have the most sophisticated
military equipment, the author says, but Mr bin Laden proves they don't
have faith in God.

Tareq Ismael Sagar's Osama bin Laden: One Man, One Movement , begins in
fairy-tale style. "On a cold evening in December, 1997,'' Sagar writes,
"a handsome young Arab sits in his room, thinking about what he can do
for the world ... his father advised him to go to Afghanistan." Forget
that Mr bin Laden was already in Afghanistan by 1997 and that it was a
senior member of the Saudi intelligence service who originally asked him
to go there – not Mr bin Laden senior. Sagar's hero worship knows no
bounds. He wishes "love to Osama'' and praises his military and economic
assistance to Bosnia, Chechnya, Sudan ...

But who can blame Muslims for being obsessed with Mr bin Laden when the
West has been equally obsessed with him for years? Choudhury proudly
tells us that his book has entered its second edition "by public
demand'', and I can believe it. Sagar's work informs readers that its
English distributors are Green Dome International Limited, operating
from 148-164 Gregory Boulevard, Nottingham, NG7 5JC. "Every Muslim,''
Sagar says, "must get to know their new leader, especially young people
... Saddam Hussein never had our support, but Osama does.''

If Choudhury lays on the jam – Mr bin Laden is "majestic'' and
"legendary'' – he deals in a now-familiar style with the World Trade
Center attacks. Assaults on America had hitherto only happened outside
the United States: in Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Aden and Al-Khobar (in
Saudi Arabia). So the World Trade Center destruction, of which there is
a powerful graphic in the volume, was obviously the work of the CIA and
Mossad. And there follow the now familiar questions about the supposedly
"missing'' 4,000 Israelis who did not go to work in the buildings on 11
September. There is no reference to the Jewish Americans slaughtered.

Sagar includes an intriguing account of one of Mr bin Laden's "hiding
places'', a system of caves in Logar province, which the author says he
visited. "I saw three places there ... three rooms; one was a library,
the second contained sophisticated communications technology. But the
third contained just a single Kalashnikov rifle, which bin Laden had
taken from a Russian officer whom he had killed in the war against the
Soviets.''

Some of the texts are a little confusing. One goes to great lengths to
deny the (hitherto unheard) argument that Mr bin Laden killed a close
Palestinian friend, Abdullah Azzam – blown up by a car bomb in Peshawar
– while others carry quotations Mr bin Laden has allegedly given in
interviews with Arab journalists. The destruction of America, he
reportedly says, "is in my hands''. After the Clinton flurry of cruise
missiles at his camps after the bombings of American embassies in
Africa, Mr bin Laden is quoted as promising that "my war has not started
yet – I believe in action, not words'', which might have come straight
from a speech by George Bush or, indeed, by Ariel Sharon.

There is an element of fantasy. Choudhury insists that Mr bin Laden
thinks in "threes". Thus we are told the most important elements in his
life are trust in God, fighting for God and fighting for a Muslim's
rights. Thus his three favorite places are the mosques of Mecca, Medina
and Jerusalem. His three most hated countries – in decreasing order of
importance, of course – are the United States, Israel and Russia.

But all is not lost. The American journalist John Cooley's Unholy Wars
has pride of place in several bookshops.

And lunatics who demand the withdrawal of any book that dares to praise
Mr bin Laden can rest assured that another personality is well
represented among the book stacks of Peshawar. I don't know why, but
Pakistanis seem obsessed with a man some regard as responsible for more
deaths than Mr bin Laden. A certain Henry Kissinger. 

© 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

###

THE END

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